An eerie silence filled the room as the news anchor continued to talk about what they called the Crescent Stadium Disaster. On the fourth day of the competition, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck the stadium. Experts remained baffled, he said, because not only was the epicenter directly under the center of the stadium, there was no major fault line anywhere near the city.

  Sato... he... he raised the entire stadium. How? Even the developed Geos that I hunted during and after The Purge could only rattle walls and shift foundations. How did he have so much power?

  "Kazuma," mother said as she sat on my bed. "I'm sorry, I didn't tell you the whole truth. There are still some people missing from that day."

  "Who's missing? Why did you lie to me?"

  "Zuzu," my sister grabbed my hand. "You just woke up from the longest nap you've ever taken. We didn't want to send you into a panic..."

  "How... what... I- I need some air."

  I struggled to get up. Yui tried to help me up, but she was still weak and shaking. Mother held her and helped me up before putting Yui's arm over her shoulder.

  "I'll take her back to her room so you can get some air, sweetie. I'll be back with lunch soon," mother calmly said before the two of them slowly made their way out.

  "She was there, I think," Yamato said after keeping quiet the whole time. "I remember seeing your sister before I blacked out."

  What?

  "She was trying to help the paramedics when you dropped me off. Needless to say, everyone was surprised when I appeared. When my guts started spilling out, they realized it wasn't a prank. I was dazed and confused by it all and remembered reaching for where you were before we jumped."

  "That hardly explains why she was shaking and why she's in the hospital too..."

  "Then how about I fill you in on what happened? Since you decided to take a nap in the middle of the fight." A cold voice came from the doorway.

  I turned around to see Nina leaning against the frame. There was something different about her. Thankfully, she was free of a hospital gown like my sister and I were, but she hardly seemed to be at her best either. I nodded, and we walked down the hall.

  "I'm sorry I passed out," I finally said. "I fought it off as long as I could, but my ability comes at a cost — splitting migraines and debilitating exhaustion."

  "Yeah," she responded. "So why then? Why did your ability backlash at the stadium? Why didn't it at the mall? The water park? The alleys?"

  "I don't know... there's still a lot about my ability that I don't know, I guess."

  "Uh huh... anyway, after you went down, the whole fight went to hell. Sato shook the stadium to the point that it collapsed in on itself. He caused that earthquake that's been on the news all weekend. When it started, we scrambled to get out. I could only carry one person out at a time. The Mashima girl went first since she was still knocked out too; Denki grabbed Rito and took off.

  "We made it to the closest aid station where I dropped her and turned back. Heading back in, I passed Denki and Rito, but do you know who I didn't pass? You, Hiro, or my idiot brother. It didn't hit me until I got back and only saw Hiro — Natsu wasn't there. I grabbed him and got back to the station thinking the two of you would make it out fine. When the quakes got stronger, and your roommate reached his hand to the stadium, I knew that my hopes were in vain.

  "I rushed back, but my own limitations hit. I couldn't run as fast as I could before: I was starving. I still got back to the stadium in seconds, but the only ones left were Sato, Black, and White... I made sure they'd never leave that stadium before I came back." She went silent after finishing her story and stared out the window in the sun room we had walked to.

  "You killed them?" I finally asked after a heavy silence.

  "No," she answered in almost an arctic voice. "The debris killed them. I just made sure they made it to their dates with Death..."

  "Nina," I looked over to see her and froze: her expression was not unlike his — Number 9's.

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  You've turned them into weapons.

  She snapped towards me and got in my face. "You don't get to 'Nina' me like you're chastising me. YOU left us right as everything went to hell. If YOU hadn't been so hesitant on taking them out when it started, it wouldn't have ended that way. If YOU had trained us to use our abilities longer... If I had been faster..."

  Her eyes were puffy and watery. She lost the staring contest she began when she turned to me. I finally noticed the difference from before.

  "Your hair... it’s longer than before"

  "What?" She was thrown off. "Y-you're imagining things... you were out for a few days, maybe you remembered wrong. Besides, why are you paying so much attention to —"

  "It's your ability, isn't it?"

  She stopped and nodded slowly, keeping our eyes from meeting. She walked over to one of the couches and took a seat facing me. With her head still hung low, she spoke in an uncharacteristic and quiet voice.

  "When I use my ability," she began. "Everything speeds up for me: my metabolism, energy conversion, the curse of being a woman... that's why I try not to use it for long periods of time: the longer I use it, the more I age. In a single afternoon, I aged six months. Natsu and I were born over two years apart, yet now we look the same and are in the same grade in school."

  "I- I never knew..."

  "You never would have known if anything would have gone my way," she fought back tears. "Now you know, and now my stupid idiotic dumbass of an older brother is missing."

  I was completely unable to say anything. All I could do was sit beside her and put my arm on her shoulder as some sort of gesture that she wasn't alone. As I did, her facade cracked. She fell into me, her face meeting my chest as the dam broke, and rivers fell from her eyes. My arm-on-the-shoulder became a hug-to-support. High noon came and went as she let out everything that she had been bottling up. At the end, she pulled away silent.

  "Thanks..." she sniffled. "I'll let you get back to your family." She got up to leave, but I grabbed her arm as she turned.

  "Wait."

  "Please, don't make me embarrass myself any more than I already have." Her voice was shaking again.

  "You said you didn't pull me out. Who did?"

  "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

  "I'll hear what you have to say regardless. What? You're going to tell me that my sister outran you and rescued me from the collapsing building?"

  I laughed at the impossibility of it, but she remained silent. She never answered verbally; all she did was look at me over her shoulder. Through the silence, my laugh became awkward and slow until it grounded to a halt. Her eyes told me everything, and I let go of her arm. She walked out of the sunroom and disappeared around the corner. I sat on the couch in utter disbelief: my sister was a meta.

  * * * * *

  I sat up in my bed. The machines were still tied to my body and chirped back and forth to each other. Even after sleeping for three days, I had managed to take a nap after everything that had happened. I threw my legs over the side and stood up. I reached for the curtain that separated me from Yamato hoping for some conversation, but when I pulled it back, there was no one in the bed. The last rays of the sun filled the air as dusk became nightfall.

  There were no flowers on my bedside table, and the door to the room was closed. The TV was off, and the light music that had previously flowed from the intercom had fallen silent. I turned back to the window and saw a figure looking outward. He wore an expensive suit, and his hands were behind his back. As the natural light fled the room, his slender figure and ivory hair became clear to me.

  "How the hell are you here, Number 9?" I asked.

  "Isn't it obvious, killer?" He turned his head slightly, and our eyes met.

  "Let me guess, I'm dreaming?"

  "Bingo," he turned back, and his scar disappeared from view.

  "So, why would I want to spend my sleeping hours talking to a ghost from the past?"

  "No one knows you better than me, killer. You got hit with a lot of information today. Maybe somewhere deep inside, you needed someone who could understand."

  "That's the second most ridiculous thing I've heard today," I sat on my bed and tried to focus on waking up.

  "Yui being a meta isn't as crazy as you think; in fact, you almost came to that conclusion before the three of them attacked. The only issue now is figuring out what her ability is... and if she's the creeping danger that Damien mentioned."

  "You take that back, right now. She may be a bro-con, but she's no danger to anyone."

  "Then how do you explain the feeling that you're being watched? Like it or not, everywhere you've felt it, she's been there: home, school, the stadium."

  "Damien made you paranoid."

  "Eclipse betraying me and hunting me like a dog made me paranoid; Damien opened your eyes to a fraction of what I see." He turned back to me. "We still technically share a body, you know."

  "Uh huh, and you're technically younger than me, so respect and obey your elders, shut up, and leave me in peace."

  "I wonder if her obsession with us is the penalty of her ability..."

  "Would you just shut up?!"

  I looked over to the window, but he was gone. Soft jazz filled the room, and the curtain rolled back revealing Yamato behind it with a look of concern on his face. I laid back and stared at the ceiling after convincing him that I was talking in my sleep. Night had fallen, and on my bedside lay a tray with a covered dinner platter.

  I'm going to figure this out. You won't have your way, Damien.